Before and after suppression: Jesuits and former Jesuits in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, c. 1750-1795
LTXVIII a. Jėzuitų ordino įtaka Abiejų Tautų Respublikoje (ATR) buvo itin didelė. Tačiau 1773 m. Jėzuitų ordinas buvo panaikintas. Šiame tekste tiriama jėzuitų padėtis ATR paskutiniaisiais Jėzuitų ordino gyvavimo dešimtmečiais ir jų prisitaikymas prie pakitusių sąlygų po ordino panaikinimo. Remiamasi literatūra, šaltinių duomenimis. Prieš pat Jėzuitų ordino panaikinimą jėzuitai sudarė didelę dalį visos ATR katalikų dvasininkijos. Šie vienuoliai vadovavo daugybei įvairaus lygio mokyklų, jų teikiamos švietimo paslaugos ir propaguojamos respublikoniškos idėjos itin traukė ATR bajoriją. Jėzuitų padėtis suprastėjo 1772 m., kai po pirmojo ATR padalijimo ženkli valstybės teritorijos dalis su čia gyvenusiais jėzuitais ir jų švietimo įstaigomis buvo prijungta prie kaimyninių valstybių. Kitais metais panaikinus Jėzuitų ordiną, ATR Seimui kilo dilema dėl ordino vienuolių vadovautų švietimo įstaigų ateities. Nuspręsta, jog švietimo reikmėms bus naudojamas perimtas ordino turtas. ATR švietimo reikalams tvarkyti buvo įkurta Edukacinė komisija, kuri nurodė jėzuitams tęsti darbą mokyklose. Tačiau komisija savo veiklos pradžioje nesugebėjo tinkamai valdyti perimto jėzuitų turto ir pasirūpinti buvusių vienuolių tinkamu materialiniu aprūpinimu. Vėliau jų materialinė padėtis pagerėjo, tačiau ankstesnės problemos padarė neatitaisomos žalos. Dalis jėzuitų mokytojų paliko savo darbo vietas ir išvyko, nemažai mokyklų sunyko. Tačiau dalis buvusių jėzuitų sugebėjo prisitaikyti prie pakitusių sąlygų, sėkmingai dirbo Vilniaus universitete, Edukacinėje komisijoje ir įvairiose kitose įstaigose.
ENIn some ways the Jesuits exercised more influence in the eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth than anywhere else in Europe. Whereas elsewhere the Society of Jesus provided confessors and spiritual advisors to princes, in the Commonwealth it educated generations of nobles as republicans. The Jesuits ran more schools and colleges than the other orders combined, and Jesuits were more numerous than members of any other single order. The research of numerous scholars has illuminated the multi-faceted activity of the Society of Jesus in the decades before suppression, allowing the revision of older verdicts on their supposedly pernicious cultural, political, and educational role. This research is ongoing, but the present chapter endeavors to synthesize some of it. It first reviews the condition of the Polish-Lithuanian Jesuits in the last decades before suppression, and then considers some of the ways former Jesuits adapted to new roles within what was left of Poland- Lithuania. The Commonwealth was truncated by partition in 1772, reduced again in 1793, and its remnants were dismembered completely in 1795. Catholic Europe’s religious orders reached their “brim of prosperity” in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. In East-Central Europe, the cup of monastic prosperity continued to fill throughout the 1750s and 1760s. This tendency also applies to the Society of Jesus in the Commonwealth. Following the announcement, but before the ratification of the First Partition, thepapal nuncio to the Commonwealth, Giuseppe Garampi, carried out a thorough survey of its regular clergy. Among 995 male abbeys, monasteries, priories, friaries, and other houses, he counted 137 that belonged to the Jesuits. Only the Dominicans, with 166, had more. Garampi computed that the total number of male religious clergy was 14,601, of whom 2,362 were Jesuits - slightly more than any other order.In comparison, the total number of female religious was just 3,211, in 156 houses, while latest estimates of the secular clergy are about 8,400. Therefore, Jesuits constituted nine per cent of the Polish-Lithuanian clergy as a whole, over ten per cent of the male clergy, thirteen per cent of the regular clergy of both sexes, sixteen per cent of the male regular clergy, and among the regular clerics (as opposed to true monks, mendicants and regular canons) they constituted sixty-seven per cent. Just under half of the Jesuits were fully ordained priests - a reflection both of their extended theological studies and of their need for numerous non-ordained brothers (coadjutors) to cany out various practical tasks. Given that the overall number of regulars of both sexes in Europe peaked during the mid-eighteenth century at about 350,000 (in over 25,000 houses), while the total number of Jesuits in Europe was less than 20,000 (about 23,000 worldwide) before the wave of expulsions that began in 1759, it is clear that Poles were disproportionately numerous within the Society of Jesus as a whole. On the eve of its suppression the Society of Jesus ran an academy at Wilno (Vilnius), thirty-five colleges, thirty-two lower schools and eighty-eight other educational establishments, while 556 Jesuits were engaged in pedagogical work in the Commonwealth. This was several times the educational provision offered by their nearest rivals, the Piarists, but was still only a quarter of the total number of Jesuits in the Commonwealth. Most of the others, however, would have taught for a while before being assigned other tasks [p. 51-52].
- Encyklopedia wiedzy o jezuitach na ziemiach Polski i Litwy, 1564-1995.. Kraków : Wydział Filozoficzny Towarzystwa Jezusowego, 1996. XVI, 882 p.
- Jėzuitai Lietuvoje (1608-2008): gyvenimas, veikla, paveldas. Vilnius : Lietuvos nacionalinis muziejus, 2012. 306 p.
- Lietuvos jėzuitų vaidmuo naujienų perdavimo procese XVIII a.. Jėzuitai Lietuvoje (1608-2008): gyvenimas, veikla, paveldas. Vilnius: Lietuvos nacionalinis muziejus, 2012. P. 219-231.
- Universitas Vilnensis: Akademia Wileńska i Szkoła Główna Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego, 1773-1792.. Pułtusk - Warszawa, 2004. 229 p.
